I mentioned in my last post that I have been offered tens – if not hundreds – of thousands of single shoes. Why are there so many single shoes?
I obtained my first batch of single shoes from a salvage company in Minnesota that had bought even more single shoes from a chain of Midwestern sporting goods stores. The story I was told is that people who need mismatched shoes will sometimes sneak a mismatched pair into the box, leaving a complementary pair of mismatched shoes that cannot be sold. I’m sure that there are also a lot of shoes that are accidentally put back in the wrong boxes with shoes of another size.
With a chain of dozens of stores each selling thousands of shoes, large numbers of mismatched – and consequently unsellable – shoes accumulate. Some chains send all such shoes to a central location where as many pairs are matched as possible, while other chains sell their single and mismatched shoes to salvage companies. The shoes that cannot be matched usually end up in landfills.
Another source of single shoes is samples. Sample shoes are usually provided for only one foot and in a single size each for men’s and women’s shoes. I have received many emails from people looking for a good home for the samples because they hate to see perfectly good shoes discarded. I wish I could offer more help.
Within weeks of receiving my first set of single shoes from Minnesota, an owner of an outlet store in Minnesota (only a few miles from the salvage company) offered to let me take as many single shoes as I wanted from his store. I started imagining Minnesota as a source of single shoes as a result of a little-known race of unipeds. For some reason, the Twin Cities seems to be a Mecca for lovers of single shoes.
Last summer, I was offered an entire warehouse of single shoes in Philadelphia if I would only show up and take them. The owner of the building was an octogenarian who was no longer able to maintain his business of matching up single shoes for sale.
The family wanted the shoes removed so that the warehouse could be turned into condominiums. There was no way I could handle what was probably well over 100,000 single shoes, but I was able to put the family in contact with someone in Texas who wanted all the single shoes he could get. Apparently, the man in Texas has enough single shoes because I have been unable to reach him for months.
